In 2012 Thoughtful.org, an advertising company, launched with the mission to connect brands with celebrities for new marketing campaigns that have a focus on social good. However, after two years of operation, the company has decided to close down existing operations, pivot, and re-brand themselves as a crowdfunding site for medical expenses.
Derek Rey, co-founder of Thoughtful.org, got the idea for the new direction when he had to care of his mother while she battled with brain cancer in 2011. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Rey detailed the experience.
“It’s a journey that exhausts all resources, as in the case for my family, and we had good health insurance and lived relatively close to our hospital in San Francisco.
Meeting people from out of state without a caregiver or family member with them, or driving themselves to chemotherapy, or the people who were not seeking treatment because they did not have health insurance, or adequate health [insurance] … Those are the people that made the shift in direction obvious. I hope they use the site.”
Thoughtful.org joins several sites that have popped up over the last few years aimed at helping people raise funds for medical, emergency, and memorial expenses. Some of these sites include GiveForward, GoFundMe, Watsi, and YouCaring.
In surprising move, Thoughful.org has decided to not charge extra fees, but instead give backers the option to include an additional gift along with their pledge. GoFundMe, a crowdfunding site for a broad range of personal causes, charges a 5 percent fee. GiveForward charges 5% percent fee, but like Thoughtful.org, allows backers to pledge extra to help cover the cost of fees.
With rising healthcare costs and high unemployment, crowdfunding sites like Thoughtful can help alleviate the serious financial strains that come with medical complications. A recent Forbes article underscored the severity of this issue, saying “A 2012 study released by the American Journal of Medicine found that 62 percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were tied to medical expenses.”
In the past, NPR has speculated that crowdfunding platforms for medical and personal causes are doing well because unlike donating to a large non-profit, backers see exactly who their donations are affecting and how.
Despite the growing trend of healthcare crowdfunding and personal fundraising, there have also been concerns of fraud and abuse, particularly when strangers are seeking donations from other strangers.
When asked by TechCrunch what Thoughful.org and its team are doing to fight the possibility of fraud on their platform, Derek Rey said that creators are expected to create a “Declaration of Facts” before launching to support their claims, which are verified through phone interviews before the project is approved. While with any model of crowdfunding there is always the possibility of fraud, these measures are used to reject the more obvious cases and discourage others from trying to misuse the system.
Crowdfunding for medical expenses, like any other crowdfunding project, still requires hard work to spread the word about your fundraising, which can help bring in traffic. For advice on crowdfunding medical expenses, we recommend checking out the CrowdCrux post, 5 Tips for Crowdfunding Medical Bills and Expenses.
About the author
Krystine Therriault is the community manager for CrowdCrux and has helped creators with their crowdfunding projects on KickstarterForum.org. She loves learning about new trending projects and dissecting them to bring new tips and information to creators. You can find her on LinkedIn here or Twitter here.
